Three-Way: PlanetSide 2 Footage

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Probably the most sizable amount of PlanetSide 2 footage appears in the video below, intercut with team members explaining why the game is going to be so brills. But I suspect they may be biased. However, if it can be more PlanetSide, spruced up, and with a larger player-base, then yes, there’s a good chance it will be. You can also see the design aesthetics of the three factions, should that slice your cake.

This news obviously comes via PlanetSide Universe, who spotted that Chinese co-developers The9 have added the video to their site. But in what is always an agonisingly stupid decision, they’ve chosen to present the promotional advert for their game in such a way that no one else can embed it. All developers and publishers: think. Fortunately, a PSU user has nabbed it and put it on YouTube, unfortunately losing some quality along the way, which you can see below. Or watch the original here.

Hopefully Sony will whir up their PR machine and get some nice high-def versions of the trailer out there soon enough.

Can anyone explain how is this game going to work? As far as I understand there is going to be one big battlefield with like 2000 people present every time. Now even a smaller games like Battlefield 3 have problems with lag. How is this game going to handle 2000 players when most of them are from different sides of the globe? How is this going to work smoothly?

We never had 2000 people on the same server then. There were like 13 continents (maps) with 3 sanctuaries, all of which were their own server. Once a continent reached a certain limit (the map was full) that continent was population locked (poplocked) and players had to go to another continent (map). Just like any other multiplayer game out there.

As for population caps, these things were sorted out during beta, and I remember there were thousands of players on each cluster (think of one cluster as the collection of all the continents/servers (we got one in Europe, and a few in the US)) during stress test, and I think eventually each continents (servers) cap was 300-400?

EDIT: The game was “cheap” bandwidth wise as it wasn’t quite as advanced as other shooters. We never had any hit regions or anything, just one big hitbox; it never mattered where you hit someone, damage was always the same. Still, sometimes the lag could be pretty horrible, so I wouldn’t say they succeeded fully.

No secrets, I’m no SoE dev, I’m just recounting the stuff that we as players had back then. As far as I can recall, been a while since that beta in 2003. I’m sure they did some really impressive things for the time, and the game remains as my favourite multiplayer experience to date, but it also meant people found ways to exploit it. Warping noobhammers in tower stairs, anybody? :P

I also remember they dumbed down the “physics” at some point so it was almost impossible to land upside down. Took a too hard turn in the wrong terrain in the bang bus and you’d tip over, or make a huge jump in your harasser and you’d arc over and fall on the roof. Good times :P

During beta, they had rotating stress tests of their servers where they removed any caps and closed all but one/two continents. This was their baseline for the cap in the full game, which was 166 vs 166 vs 166. This was later reduced to 133 per side after a year or two as performance steadily got worse. To confuse things further*, they also had a dynamic cap on the third empire to join a fight so if NC and VS were filling a continent up and the TR decided to join in, the TR wouldn’t be able to bring as many people in.

Also, one server ran two continents. Which is kinda impressive.

*So confusing I’m not 100% sure on this. It did change a few times, too.

They got away with this back then because, for the most part, they used simplistic arbitration mechanics. e.g. firing didn’t work like standard fps fare; instead, they used a firing cone which – among other things – allowed them to cheat on projectile prediction, hitscan and all that.

Now I’ve heard that they’re getting rid of that “firing cone” and going balls out on fps shooting mechanics. Which means that they had better have some pretty powerful servers and a super fast client-side rendering engine to have 1000 clients per server instance; poplock or not

Shameless plug: http://lodmmo.com (expect a barrage of news and new gameplay stuff this month). Our world is MUCH bigger – better – faster – more realistic (in terms of expectations). Plus we have SPACE!!! And I’m not talking just that Eve Online space nonsense. I’m talking full on SEAMLESS combat on planets (incl. inside buildings), in space (incl. inside stations, carriers) etc

I’m really hoping the devs havent been overambitious with this one. The concept of Planetside and anything like it (persistent universes where players are able to alter the balance of power) is always going to send people into a frenzy, but the proof will be in the execution. If they bugger up their launch with overloaded servers, copious lag or a naff client, the game could suffer badly in the long term.

As for Line of Defence, I’d not heard of it before but I’ll certainly be keeping an eye on it.

I’ll keep an eye on LOD, but I did cringe a bit at this line from the FAQ: “While some may shrug or frown at the only two factions, there is no empirical evidence or research to suggest that having any particular number makes a game any good or bad.” In a system where new players can join the winning side, how are you going to prevent massive, massive faction-population discrepancies? It’d be a shame to have the game follow in WAR’s footsteps.

Anyway, I am hoping that Planetside 2 gives me a chance to enjoy what I tasted in the first one. I had good enough internet / pc to play the game, but not to play the game well. I’d get all setup for a battle, but then the fighting would actually start, and my poor little PC would freak out.

Unfortunately you’re wrong. Planetside is pretty famous for not using htiscan weapons which was impressive for its time, especially when you consider hitscan is still used today. Each projectile was a definite object with travel time, and the server had to track the position of each projectile in a fight. What they did cheat with is the lack of location based hitboxes and client side predictions. That last bit was a huge problem as someone lagging could wipe out many people as on their screens everyone would be quite smooth and thus their computer would tell the server that they hit, whereas their opponents computers would never register a hit as the lagger was warping all over the screen. It also made it easy to make cheats and hacks.

I’ll keep an eye on LOD, but I did cringe a bit at this line from the FAQ: “While some may shrug or frown at the only two factions, there is no empirical evidence or research to suggest that having any particular number makes a game any good or bad.” In a system where new players can join the winning side, how are you going to prevent massive, massive faction-population discrepancies? It’d be a shame to have the game follow in WAR’s footsteps.

The number of sides – as I stated – is irrelevant. That’s what classes and abilities – not to mention SKILL – are for. This is, first and foremost, a skill based game. no rolling of the dice or any of that nonsense.

In fact, the lore that LOD is based on has over a dozen alien nations with more than two dozen castes (aka factions?). I chose only two for a specific reason and expect to add others depending on how the game goes.

And unlike PS2 – or its predecessor – LOD has no support for one person with a hacking skill being able to single-handedly decide the ebb and flow of the war. I’m not going to reveal our mechanic, but it is unlike anything that has been done before. Which – of course – is typical with my games; in that I tend to tread where no fool would dare. :)

@Asurmen says:01/05/2012 at 15:43

Unfortunately you’re wrong. Planetside is pretty famous for not using htiscan weapons which was impressive for its time, especially when you consider hitscan is still used today. Each projectile was a definite object with travel time, and the server had to track the position of each projectile in a fight. What they did cheat with is the lack of location based hitboxes and client side predictions. That last bit was a huge problem as someone lagging could wipe out many people as on their screens everyone would be quite smooth and thus their computer would tell the server that they hit, whereas their opponents computers would never register a hit as the lagger was warping all over the screen. It also made it easy to make cheats and hacks.

I never said they used hitscan weapons. How could they, in an fps? What they did – with the cone of fire – and other mechanics, is similar to that – AND – as you pointed out, had no client side prediction as a side effect of that.

I never said they used hitscan weapons. How could they, in an fps? What they did – with the cone of fire – and other mechanics, is similar to that – AND – as you pointed out, had no client side prediction as a side effect of that.

A lot of FPS games use hitscan for their bullet based weapons. Shotguns in Planetside used hitscan, and I’m pretty sure all of their non-projectile ones (bar the rifle) did too. The issue Planetside had was the client side hit detection and movement prediction were heavily tied to how the server was performing and could very easily lose synch for a split second. CSHD was authenticated by the server, but when the server was having issues the player movement prediction got bad. So you ended up telling the server something that wasn’t possible and it ignored it.

You knew when something was up when you saw a guy run up the stairs, reach the top and then continue up into the air and through the wall before warping back to where he really was. Exploiting it was just a case of using light armour and strafing left/right quickly while you engaged people. You would see them move much further to the side than they really were, and any hits while they were there would then be discounted by the server. If you weren’t moving around like a numpty, then a smaller number of false hits would be discarded for the other player and the server would tell your client you were dead.

Problem is balance is also to do with what times of day people are logged in. If you have 3 sides it makes balancing it easier. Not that you are wrong, I’m sure it is possible to do it with 2 factions.

The number of sides – as I stated – is irrelevant. That’s what classes and abilities – not to mention SKILL – are for. This is, first and foremost, a skill based game. no rolling of the dice or any of that nonsense.

In fact, the lore that LOD is based on has over a dozen alien nations with more than two dozen castes (aka factions?). I chose only two for a specific reason and expect to add others depending on how the game goes.

I think that we’re talking about two separate issues. I think that you are referring to something along the lines of ‘play styles available’, in the form of classes, variety of abilities, etc. You mention that, perhaps the multitude of castes in your fiction would count as factions. But for the point I was trying to make, I would not consider ‘two dozen castes’ to be separate factions, unless those castes are all fighting each other.

The problem two-enemy games get into (as far as PvP MMOs go), is that the size of each faction simply won’t remain constant. Let’s say my server start at 50/50 Terran military to Insurgents. Through playing the game, the server finds itself at 40% / 60% military to insurgents. Suddenly, the people on the losing side aren’t having fun because they’re always outnumbered (personal skill only matters so much…numbers trump all). So players on the losing side start leaving the server looking for a more balanced one. At the same time, players new to the server are more likely to join the winning side, resulting into dual forces making the population balance worse.

The reason having more conflicting sides helps is that, if one side gets to powerful, the two smaller sides can temporarily team up to try and work against the superior one. Without the extra power of a third side, the death spiral of ‘losing side just gets weaker’ results in either incredibly boring PVP (one side always dominates) or incredibly contrived ‘sharing’ (the two factions take turns owning land, so that the other can get the bonuses for ‘recapturing’ the next week).

WAR suffered from this problem immensely. Like your fiction, the Warhammer universe could easily support a much larger number of enemy sides. But the developers decided to limit it to Order vs. Chaos. Sure, each ‘side’ had a few races and unique classes, but the thing that really crippled WAR’s pvp was that there were only two enemy sides fighting. Instead of, say, the High Elves temporarily aligning with the Dwarves to take on a particularly powerful Dark Elf army…you got stuck with Chaos and Order trading purposely trading pvp zones with each other.

The other approach is the Eve/Darkfall way, where technically, there are a few factions, but players end up creating their own factions (corps and guilds, respectively) that fight against each other. This way, if your guild is getting hammered, you can create alliances, or search out new blood. You can use trade, diplomacy, bribery, etc, to help even the odds in an unbalanced fight. When there are only two sides fighting, none of those tactics work.

So really, it’s not about how many classes you have, or how many races you have. It’s not about which of your plethora of aliens you include in the game. Ultimately, even player skill gets trumped by numbers. The success of your PvP, in a very large way, will come down to how many potential enemies and allies each team has. Now, maybe you have some mechanic in mind to help keep your servers more balanced, and if so, cool. But just saying ‘oh, it’s not an issue’, when games have made MMO history (DAOC) or fallen to the wayside (WAR) almost solely due to the number of enemy teams seems dangerous.

A 3-way battle opens up a multitude of “disruption” strategies that take advantage of the relative chaos.
A 2-way battle has a pretty standard enemy: THEM OVER THAR. And you know exactly what they’re doing: ATTACKING ME.

Go play risk 1×1.
Then go play kdice, 1x1x1x1x1x1x1.
Tell me which is more interesting…